Berytus

• 1. Introduction

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  Berytus once earned a description usually reserved for capitals: it stood among 'the great law schools of Rome, Constantinople, and Berytus,' with its own school singled out as 'pre-eminent' among the three. That name, Berytus, belonged to the ancient city that occupies the site of modern Beirut, in Lebanon. It carried that name through the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire, and the early Byzantine period. A Phoenician harbor town somehow rose to sit beside Rome and Constantinople in matters of law. Before the Romans called it Berytus, though, this same city answered to an entirely different Greek and Phoenician name. And centuries after its lawyers helped shape an empire's legal code, something violent brought that era to a sudden stop. What carried a small Levantine port to such heights, and what finally silenced it?

• 2. A City Twice Renamed

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  In 140 BC, the Phoenician city then called Beʾerūt was destroyed by Diodotus Tryphon in his contest with Antiochus VII Sidetes for the Seleucid throne. Its rebuilding came without a clear date, but merchants from the city were already trading prosperously on the island of Delos by 110-109 BC. The rebuilt city adopted a new name, one stamped on its coins in two languages at once. In Greek it read Laodicea in Phoenicia; in Phoenician script it read Laodicea which is in Canaan, honoring a Seleucid queen named Laodice.

  That name lasted until 64 BC, when Pompey's Roman forces conquered the city during the final decades of the Republic. The Romans renamed it Berytus, reviving the old Phoenician name of the original port village. Veteran soldiers soon arrived, and the city began large building projects almost immediately. Within a few decades, this once-modest port would become one of Rome's most privileged colonies anywhere in the Syria-Phoenicia region.

• 3. A Colony of Veterans

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  In 14 BC, during the reign of Herod the Great, the city became an important Roman colonia named Colonia Iulia Augusta Felix Berytus. According to the historian Theodore Mommsen's edition of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, the honor was for Julia the Elder, the only daughter of Augustus. Augustus settled veterans of two legions there, the fifth Macedonian and the third Gallic.

  Two thirds of the population soon descended from these Roman veterans, and the city Romanized with remarkable speed. Berytus became the only fully Latin-speaking city in the Syria-Phoenicia region, a status it held until the fourth century. It was also one of just four Roman colonies in that region, and the sole one granted full Ius Italicum, exemption from imperial taxation.

  By the reign of Trajan, Berytus had grown into a city of nearly 50,000 people, with a large forum and necropolis. Historians describe it as the most Roman city anywhere in the empire's eastern provinces. That same Roman identity would soon be carved into marble monuments overlooking the coastline.

• 4. Stone, Water, and Games

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  Herod the Great, Agrippa I and II, and Queen Berenice built exedras, porticos, temples, a forum, a theater, an amphitheater, and baths in the city. Agrippa in particular favored Berytus, inaugurating his theatre and amphitheatre with games and spectacles, including shows of gladiators. Now only minor ruins of that theatre remain, in front of Beirut's Catholic Cathedral.

  The new Roman city's streets followed a grid plan, spaced at intervals similar to those of Damascus and Laodicea. It spread south and west of the old port, with its forum located near what is now the Place de l'Etoile. On the forum's north side stood a civic basilica, 99 meters long, fronted by a Corinthian portico of polychrome materials from the 1st century AD.

  Large baths have been uncovered on the eastern slope of the Colline du Sérail. Nearby, on the same hill's northwestern side, stood a hippodrome, the largest known anywhere in the Levant. The scholar Linda Hall has written that the hippodrome was still operating in the fifth century. Villas in a southern suburb facing the sea had mosaic floors, now held in the Beirut Museum.

  Four large bath complexes, plus numerous private baths, drove up the city's demand for water. Romans built an aqueduct fed by the Beirut River, whose main source lay 10 km from the city. It crossed the river at Qanater Zbaydeh before reaching Riad Al Solh Square. There, at the foot of Serail Hill, the water was stored in cisterns and distributed through a network of lead or clay pipes. Some 12 km upstream, the ruined arches of that aqueduct still stand today.

  A monumental Roman Gate, its walls huge, was only recently uncovered in the city. Berytus also served as a trade center for silk and wine, linked by efficient Roman roads to Heliopolis and Caesarea. According to historian Kevin Butcher, the city's Latin character stayed dominant until the fifth century. It remained a center for Latin literature and, after Septimius Severus, for the study of Roman law. Marcus Valerius Probus, a Roman colonist's son born in Berytus around AD 25, became known across the empire as a Latin grammarian during Nero's reign. Roman emperors also promoted culture in Greek, as with Hermippus of Berytus. Whatever gods watched over this thriving port, coins from the city hint they were not all Roman.

• 5. Gods of Many Peoples

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  Poseidon held a closer relationship with Berytus than any other god, serving as the city's chief deity. Berytian merchants revered him so deeply that they called themselves 'Poseidonistes.' Until the third century CE, his image was a regular feature on coins minted in the city.

  On its coins, Poseidon was often shown resembling the Phoenician god Baal Berit, blending Greek and Levantine traditions in a single image. That same blending was typical of Berytus, which did not confine itself to one pantheon. An inscription written in both Greek and Latin similarly gave the Roman god Jupiter the Phoenician epithet 'Baal.' That same willingness to blend traditions extended beyond religion, into the fertile valley the Romans folded into Berytus's own territory.

• 6. The Bekaa Valley

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  Under the emperor Claudius, Berytus's territory reached all the way to the Bekaa Valley, taking in the city of Heliopolis. This was the only district in the Syria-Phoenicia region that remained mostly Latin-speaking, because Roman colonists developed agriculture in the fertile lands around Yammoune.

  From the 1st century BC, the Bekaa Valley supplied grain to Roman provinces across the Levant, and even to Rome itself. Today, that same valley still accounts for up to 40 percent of Lebanon's arable land. Roman colonists established a 'country district' there called Pagus Augustus, home to the Niha temples and their Latin inscriptions. Not far from those grain fields, another institution was earning Berytus a reputation that would outlast the empire itself: its school of law.

• 7. Mother of Laws

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  Two of Rome's most celebrated jurists, Papinian and Ulpian, both natives of Phoenicia, taught at the law school of Berytus under the Severan emperors. Contemporaries praised the school with a Latin motto, Berytus Nutrix Legum, 'Beirut, Mother of Laws.'

  When Justinian assembled his Pandects in the sixth century, a large part of that Latin 'Corpus of Laws' came directly from Papinian's and Ulpian's writings. In 533 AD, Justinian formally recognized the school of Berytus as one of the empire's three official law schools.

  For three centuries, the law school of Berytus supplied the Roman Empire's eastern provinces with lawyers and magistrates. Since the third century, the city had held an important law college. There, the great codification of Roman law was prepared for emperors including Theodosius II and Justinian. That three-century run of legal training would end only when the ground itself gave way.

• 8. Twilight and Rediscovery

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  In the sixth century, a series of earthquakes demolished most of the temples at Heliopolis, today's Baalbek, and destroyed the city of Berytus itself. According to the Anonymous Pilgrim of Piacenza, nearly 30,000 inhabitants were killed, and the quake leveled the famous law school along with them. Its students were transferred to Sidon.

  Around 400 AD, earthquakes had already struck Berytus, yet Rome still passed over the city and made Tyre the capital of the province of Phoenicia. Berytus's most famous bishop in antiquity, Eusebius, later became Bishop of Nicomedia and a strong supporter of Arianism in the fourth century. In 450 CE, Emperor Theodosius II granted Berytus the title of metropolis, with jurisdiction over six sees taken from Tyre. The Council of Chalcedon restored those sees to Tyre the following year. From 451 CE onward, Berytus remained an exempt metropolis answering directly to the Patriarch of Antioch.

  The fifth and sixth century Christian councils never fully settled the religious disputes within Berytus's own community. Weakened by this turbulence and already Hellenized, the city was reduced to the size of a village. It fell to the newly converted Muslim Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula in 635 CE.

  At the Garden of Forgiveness, archaeologists uncovered Roman Berytus's two main streets, the cardo and decumanus. Their shaded colonnades turned into busy markets on festival days. At other times, they carried law students and citizens toward the Forum, temples, and churches. In 1968, excavators found the landscaped 'Roman Baths' Gardens on the Serail Hill's eastern slope. The ruins underwent thorough cleaning and further excavation in 1995-1997. The British firm Gillespies then redesigned the gardens, with low glass walls and lookout platforms that double as concert venues. The result gave the site a modern touch without harming its historical fabric.

  Near the turn of the 20th century, researchers located the site of the old Roman law school. It lay between what are now the Saint George Greek Orthodox Cathedral and the Saint George Cathedral of the Maronites. There, they unearthed a funerary stele bearing an epitaph to a man named Patricius. It read that his career 'was consecrated for the study of law.' Archaeologists identified him as a fifth-century professor at the law school. A 1994 dig beneath the Greek Orthodox cathedral in Nejmeh Square uncovered elements of the Anastasis cathedral across 316 square meters. It never reached the school itself.

  The fifth-century writer Zacharias Rhetor once located that same school beside the 'Temple of God.' That description still points excavators toward the Anastasis cathedral, and toward whatever remains of Berytus's Mother of Laws still buried beneath it.